After all the crap I've been watching, all the cheap westerns that start the same way, with an isolated house being massacred by a roving criminal band, I watched Roman Polanski's Cul-de-sac for the first time in years. Donald Pleasence and his wife, Francoise Dorleac, live in an old castle on the British coast. They're separated from the mainland every evening when the tide comes in. A home invasion story. Two injured criminals (Lionel Stander and Jack MacGowran) come there after a botched job.
In an opening scene, we see Stander sitting in their disabled car on the side of the road. He pulls his foot away from an insect that comes crawling up to him. Then he spits at it. Later, he refuses to kill and cook a chicken.
Later still, he urges Dorleac to "Smack him good!" when she catches a child messing with her phonograph.
He's violent, but he's not a monster.
The movie's been compared to Waiting for Godot or the work of Harold Pinter. I never made it very far into anything by Beckett, but I can see the Harold Pinter comparison.
Polanski is a great director, but I wonder how much of this was a fluke. According to IMDb, it was such a difficult movie to make between the weather, the setting and the cast, that he said he was ready to quit film, but he was very pleased with the end result. During the filming, Donald Pleasence was given the task of leading the actors to tell Polanski to stop acting like an egomaniac.
"It had to be done," Pleasence said. "Polanski was the only prima donna on that film."
Free on Tubi.
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